Exposición en Madrid, España

Tara

Dónde:
F2 Galería / Doctor Fourquet, 28 bajo / Madrid, España
Cuándo:
30 mar de 2019 - 18 may de 2019
Inauguración:
30 mar de 2019 / 12:00
Horario:
M/V 10:30h – 19:30h / S 11h – 14h
Precio:
Entrada gratuita
Organizada por:
Artistas participantes:
Descripción de la Exposición
Love me not / a minor archive More than fifteen years ago, literary theorist Ann Cvetkovich famously claimed the need for an “archive of feelings”, an archive of all the things mundane and ordinary, usually deemed minor and unworthy of preserving, or difficult to chronicle through the materials of a conventional archive[1]. Cvetkovich was particularly concerned with the queer histories that leave no formal records: neglected histories of trauma, survival, resistance, intimate lives and radical inventions of desire that elude institutional recording[2]. By reclaiming an “archive of feelings”, Cvetkovich challenged the contours of what counts as worthy of archival registration, whilst positing the sphere of sentimentality, intimacy and desire as relevant as what is commonly perceived as public life. Aligned with other readers of sentimentality, Cvetkovich defends feelings and emotional attachments against the usual patriarchal condescension that deems these manifestations unprestigious, minor and undeserving of intellectual attention[3]. Material culture was ... of particular interest to her, especially the need to preserve ordinary things, and the feelings and emotions attached to them. The category of the archive for her thus stands for this urge to understand how we may collect feelings, store them, or save them through ordinary objects, ephemera and random stuff that we hang on to. This notion of an “archive of feelings” radically changes how we think of the textures of everyday life as minor, trivial and impossible to preserve, whilst also refusing to see the archive as only a technology of power, and rather as a gesture capable of shifting what counts as deserving of inscription, preservation and care. Under today’s all-encompassing data archives, one could say that Cvetkovich’s archive of feelings has come to a full and bleak fruition. The mundane affective experiences that Cvetkovich urged us to pay attention to have become a raw material for accumulation and extraction of value in the form of data. Our most ordinary and unremarkable feelings are constantly being collected, mined and translated into profitable insights by the data infrastructures that permeate our lives. Notions of intimacy have shifted tremendously, so much so that theorists now speculate that algorithms might know us better than our closest friends. The “archive of feelings” can now be seen as a precursor of the contemporary drive to draw value from “affective data”. The minor has become ‘big’. While for Cvetkovich and other queer theorists, the archive was seen as a crucial category to reclaim the political visibility so often denied to minoritized subjects, today’s digital archives are able to gather increasingly vast and granular information about our everyday lives. This intensive visibility has radically changed the stakes in the exploration of archives. In making easily accessible what might have previously been characterized as ephemera, the digital permits “immersion in a kaleidoscopic range of past subjectivities, historical and fabulated”[4]. In thinking about the archive today, then, the task shifts from reclaiming visibility for minor affects to developing new ways of conceiving of opacity, legibility, deletion, and preservation. How to preserve our most intimate recollections without being captured or rendered hypervisible and knowable?. Rita Ferreira’s body of work can hardly be seen as directly engaging with digital or queer problematics, but it does speak compellingly to the logics of archival inscription that is reshaping our lives. Tara brings together a series of works that draws from the artist’s personal archive of ephemera and early memories, an archive whose legibility is however precluded and deferred. Rita Ferreira’s practice often departs from the concrete materiality of everyday artefacts to reflect upon the relation between objects and representation subtending pictorial language. Her works frequently refer to particular objects, but their origin and reference are unknown; they are objects inasmuch as they respect objectual conventions. By showing objects removed from their original context, her paintings invite viewers to formulate signifying structures where these refigured objects can take on a pictorial life of their own. In Tara, this reflection on the irreferentiality of pictorial representation is conducted through the artist’s refiguration of her own archive of feelings, a somewhat autobiographical departure from her previous works. Yet, this biographical dimension is ultimately undermined by the pictorial imaginary that she construes, an imaginary where preserved objects, and the feelings and attachments they evoke, are not to be given away to recognition, identification or legibility. What kinds of attachments do these works store once the objects are no longer recognizable as the originary ones? Through this dis-figurative gesture, Ferreira’s work ascribes pictorial relevance and legitimacy to objects otherwise considered minor or insignificant, whilst at the same time denying a process of recognition that could give away the affective investment projected onto those objects. There is, then, a simultaneous inscription and erasure that is, after all, at the root of any gesture of archival registration. One could recall here Derrida’s notion of the “archi-trace”, and his suggestion that the archive cannot be conflated with origin (or arché). This does not mean that the origin has disappeared, but rather that the moment of archival inscription registers the originary event as a trace, as non-origin. In fact the archive cannot be understood without this notion of the archi-trace, which entails both the origin and its erasure or suspension through traces. Ultimately, the very archived event is always already marked by the trace of its own inscription in the archive. Similarly, Rita Ferreira’s body of work leads us to an understanding of the archive as a gesture that by inscribing makes the origin dis/appear. What is left is a trace that does not have to lead us back to an originary object, experience, or feeling, but which produces a mark that exists on its own. The originary object does not have to be immediately legible, nor the affects invested onto them need to be extractable, for the archival registration to function. One of the paintings in the exhibition draws on one of the artist’s oldest ephemera, the petals of a daisy used to play love-me/love-me-not, a sentimental game in which one person seeks to determine whether the object of their affection returns the feeling. While picking one petal off a flower, the person playing the game alternately speaks the phrases “he (or she) loves me” and “he (or she) loves me not”. The phrase they speak on picking off the last petal supposedly represents the truth between the object of affection loving them or not. What is interesting in this game is that the person picking the petals is most likely not looking for the truth, but rather seeking to confirm a pre-existing belief. If the last petal coincides with “loves me not”, chances are that the player will start over with a new flower until the belief (or hope) is confirmed. The motivation driving the game is that the answer can always be deferred, and that a satisfying answer does not necessarily equate with the truth. Verification is not the end goal; it’s the affective movement flowing between object and loving subject that matters, and this movement does not require logical satisfaction. The petals stand for this suspension of truth in favour of the quest, in favour of an affect that cannot be acted upon, an affect (a trace) that exists on its own. This suspension is potentially at the heart of pictorial representation, and at the heart of the archive, perhaps a minor archive, one that does not purport to offer legibility, but rather carries the traces of a minor truth whose value resides in its suspension - and in our holding on to it. Daniela Agostinho March 2019 [1]Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings. Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. [2]For a critique of Cvetkovich’s take on the archive see Sara Edenheim, “Lost and Never Found. The Queer Archive of Feelings and its Historical Propriety”, differences2013, 24(3): 36-62. [3]See for instance Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint. The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. See also Sianne Ngai’s discussion of minor affects in Ugly Feelings,Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007. [4]Tavia Nyong’o em Arondekar, Anjali, Ann Cvetkovich, Christina B. Hanhardt, Regina Kunzel, Tavia Nyong’o, Juana María Rodríguez, Susan Stryker, Daniel Marshall, Kevin P. Murphy, and Zeb Tortorici, “Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion.” Radical History Review122, 2015, p. 218.

 

 

Entrada actualizada el el 27 mar de 2019

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Premio
28 nov de 2023 - 31 ago de 2024

Madrid, España

Exposición
Desde 21 mar de 2024

Galería Elvira González / Madrid, España

Formación
21 sep de 2023 - 04 jul de 2024

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) / Madrid, España

Exposición Online
08 feb de 2024 - 09 abr de 2024

Online

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